How to nominate on Kusama Network
Known as Polkadot’s wild cousin, Kusama is a “canary” network, a term that implies its function is to warn of issues that could endanger the safety of the Polkadot mainet down the line.
Kusama is not a testnet, but rather an early, rough and unaudited release of Polkadot. It can be viewed as a middle ground between a testnet and a main-net that allows us to play around with real economic incentives(staking, nominating and validating), deploy parachains, and participate in governance. It is expected that Kusama network will continue even after the launch of Polkadot.
This experimental network has its own token, called KSM. If you have participated in the Polkadot sale of DOT tokens, you can claim an equivalent number of KSM tokens.
Validators
Kusama’s security depends on its validators running nodes and validating new blocks. Right now there are 100 validators securing the network, but the validator set will grow as soon as Kusama is stable enough to allow it.
The validator set is not predetermined, anyone can become a validator, but for most DOT and KSM holders, nominating validators will be the most convenient option, as it allows you to contribute to the network, receive rewards and participate in governance without setting up nodes of your own.
In order to stake, you need to bond the tokens, which means that they are locked. Keep in mind that it takes 7 days to unbond them.
As a nominator, you can nominate up to 16 trusted validators, the keyword here being trusted because, as it is you’re being warned in the nominator guide, if the validator you nominated gets slashed, you lose some of the bonded tokens that you have delegated to that validator.
How to start nominating
The first step is to go to Polkadot’s UI dashboard and create your account. It’s all pretty straight forward, you either click on the pop-up saying “Create an account now” or you to the Account tab in the side menu and click “Add Account”
Once your account is created, make sure that you’re connected to the Kusama network by going to the Settings tab and Selecting Kusama(canary) as your address prefix.
In order to keep your assets safe while staking, it is recommended that you create 2 accounts:
- Stash account: This account is where you keep your tokens and its only function is to safely hold the funds, so we recommend you keep it offline.
- Controller account: This is the account that you use to manage the tokens held by the stash account. You’ll use this account to start nominating validators and also to end your nominations
To nominate validators you need to bond the KSM held in your stash account. You can do that in the Staking sections of the Polkadot UI dashboard. Go to the second tab called “Account actions” and ass a New stake. Then select your stash account, the controller account and the amount of tokens that you want to bond.
Now you’re ready to nominate and start collecting your rewards! Just head over to the Staking tab and pick the validators that you want to nominate. Click on the icon and it automatically copies the validator address, then go to the Account Action tab and select “Nominate”.
You can choose if you want to let the algorithm allocate the number of bonded KSM to be delegated to each validator or you can delegate a specific, pre-defined amount of your choosing.
Giving the fact that your tokens are dependent on the reliability of the validators you choose, we recommend you do some research before entrusting them with your tokens. For additional information, you can check out the Polkadot Telemetry.
Why you should nominate Dokia Capital
Dokia Capital is one of the most trusted validators in this space. We’ve earned this reputation by supporting the project from early beginngs and prioritising safety and reliability.
Our infrastructure benefits from unlimited enterprise-grade protection against Layer 3 and 4 DDoS attacks and we operate a 99.982% Guaranteed Availability -Tier3 Certified TIA-94 2 data center, with extensive fire prevention and protection equipment and procedures.
We have a great track record of uptime and we’re maintaining that standard by running a high availability infrastructure in multiple geographically distributed datacenters.
